“We now know,” she thought, “the fate of at least one of your companions, and it must be a cause of satisfaction to you that you have pursued your inquiries successfully, and that you are relieved of further trouble by the fact that he had a body which was not worth preservation.” “I felt sure that they were about to destroy him,” I answered, “and could not endure to look longer. How did they do it?” She showed me an instant’s picture of the scene as her mind had followed it. I saw his still-living body in the jaws of half-a-dozen pig-like animals to whom it had been thrown for their fattening. My companion recognised the repulsion that disturbed my mind with a puzzled wonder, and a sympathetic curiosity. “I wish,” she thought, “that I could understand the feeling which moves you.” “I wish,” I answered, “that I could understand how you can reject all violence as evil, and yet condone such actions.” “I condone nothing,” she replied, with a friendly coolness which tended to reduce the temperature of my own thoughts. “I am not concerned to defend or condemn. I am merely curious of your own repulsion. Your fellow-primitive introduced a body which is diseased or defective. It is so seriously so that the Dwellers, after a patient examination, do not think it either fit to continue, or to be used for their own food, and they therefore use it for the fattening of healthier creatures. What better could they do? If you identify yourself with him, should you not be grateful for the trouble to which they went?” I paused a moment, knowing that the query required something better than a random answer, and the pause lengthened to silence. Feeling might still remain, but judgment answered too plainly. I had forgotten once again that we were alien and inferior creatures, of an uninvited coming. Did not my own race feed one living animal to another in their zoological reservations? Would they have taken the preliminary trouble to examine the body of such a creature? When they decided to reduce the number of the tame and trusting doves in their capital city, had they sufficient care or intelligence to select the weaker or diseased for destruction? Did they not kill and torture countless thousands of other creatures, even including those that they had bred and trained to friendship, to gratify curiosity or to gain some possible advantage to themselves in combating the diseases that their vices earned? Could that which I had seen be properly described as vivisection of any kind? Such things might be; and I had little confidence that the Dwellers would hesitate to practise such infamies, but, in fact, I had not seen them. I answered simply, “I was unreasonable, and you have taught me wisdom, as you do so often.”